Pebbles in the pond

Monthly Archives: August 2012

We hear the expression “toxic people” and think: there are no toxic people, but there are people whom we allow to be toxic to ourselves. So rather than being toxic they are merely toxible. They would not be toxic to us if we knew how to handle the experience of them.

Take the case of Corporal Luiz. Luiz went through an evolution in the way he took in experience from his boss, Sergeant Murray, who never missed an opportunity to make Luiz feel small.

Early in the process Luiz daydreamed about fragging Murray. Unfortunately or not they were Stateside and fragging was not an available option, nor would we recommend it. A bit later on things eased slightly for Luiz when he got it that Murray was doing the same thing to everyone under him. His first bit of learning was to remind himself not to take it personally. This helped a lot because it put Luiz on the trail of discovering that Murray’s behavior was not the result of free will because Murray was a taken-over robot, mechanically living out a reaction script to being oppressed under the thumb of Lieutenant Gray, who probably had his own causes behind acting toxibly to Murray and God knows whom else. Serendipitously and synchronistically Luiz picked up a book by Dr. Robert Ornstein and read about the reptile part of the human brain, anachronistically still causing pecking-order behaviors in humans.

The onion peeled every day for Luiz now living mainly in the Observer state especially when around Murray. He saw that each of his peers now having fallen in helplessly with Murray’s style, were unconsciously protecting themselves by laughing at Luiz when Murray picked on him, and doing the same to each other. Again Luiz realized not to take it personally and was beginning to see the situation in the objective scientific way that automatically removes the sting from the negative emotional reaction. He used the discomfort he still felt to find the things within him that he realized needed changing, things that attracted him into such situations and were vulnerable to childish nonsense. He relived moments he had never forgiven himself for, saw more deeply into the causes, and realized that his actions had not been as basely motivated as he had always blamed himself for. He forgave himself and cleared the ancient debt list.

The first moment of triumph came when Murray picked on Luiz, and Luiz did so obviously not care one whit, that the rest of the squad was impressed and the tide began to turn on Murray. In the end Luiz turned into Murray’s mentor and wised him up on how to be free and not a robot. But that was many years later. Luiz had to wait until Murray came to him and asked.

To remain in the Observer and Flow states, observe your own negative emotion and work with it, turning off the emotional alarm with gratitude for telling you to figure out the situation and discern right action.

Negative emotion and Flow state cannot happen simultaneously within a person. If the objective is Flow state, the ecstasy of simply being, with freedom in place of fear, then to thine own self be true and use the Observer state to root out things you are hiding even from yourself, and make a deal with yourself to expunge all negative emotion — including fear.

In Flow state, inspirations keep popping even in the middle of a sentence and you incorporate them easefully because you are not afraid you might say the wrong thing. Not because saying the wrong thing is impossible in Flow but because it is irrelevant. If you are communicating in the Flow state, the object is not being right but instead collectively reaching truth and right action — as Socrates pioneered.

Fear has been prevalent since the dawn of recorded history, except for those who have attained Observer and Flow states. We postulate that the recording of history, which occurred as the result of written language, therefore started at the same time as Acceleritis — the pandemic disease of the mind caused by information overload and triggered by written language itself.

Today there is more rational reason for fear than ever before. Practically no one has enough money to not live in fear of losing one’s job. Companies are turning over personnel rapidly and cutting jobs. The average person is keeping his or head down rather than trying to fix things because stepping forward is a risk that could go either way.

Some people are afraid because to their own minds they still have not proven themselves. There might be a hidden senator in their mind such as the taped and aped voice of e.g. their verbally abusive parent. They might feel the need to prove themselves to that mother, father, spouse, critic or rival sibling, or one of the people who has been unknowingly projected into taking over one of those roles. Or they might have achieved a degree of autonomy and do not need anyone else’s approval, but having achieved a degree of nobility and having taken on the world’s problems, they might be afraid they will die before succeeding in some noble cause.

Even in the latter case, hidden fear precludes Flow state. Observer state must be cultivated to remove the hidden blockages within and thus enable Flow state. One may continue to pursue the noble cause but without a fear of failing, with acceptance of whatever the outcome may be, still doing one’s best to make the dream come true. In this manner one will rest within the higher states, often rising to Flow and thereby maximizing the probability of achieving the objective.

Observer state can be used to detect flashes of fear that come and go so fast one would not be aware of them in lower consciousness levels. In Observer state, one is actually observing the mental function of repression taking place. This is an amazing feeling. Observer state is not as dramatically amazing as Flow state but it too has its amazing moments, yours for the taking.

Observer state is a mindset in which you are not so caught in the process of your own emotions, and thus you are able to also simultaneously observe and analyze them somewhat impassively. This is a lens you sometimes find yourself wearing which makes you more effective and creative at changing the conditions that cause negative emotions. It also makes you more able to flick into the Zone where your performance and creativity are further upshifted.

In the Observer state, we hypothesize that information processing is going on largely in the prefrontal lobes. In the Flow state (aka the Zone) we postulate whole-brain balanced and meshed information processing.

The Human Effectiveness Institute has developed techniques to empower people to spend more time in these states, which are conducive to a happy successful purposeful life. Acceleritis is the cultural condition caused by the speedup in human evolution and daily information overload apparently caused by the invention of written language — according to our theory. Acceleritis raises the challenge slope facing human beings every day and makes it harder for us to use the new brain evolved in just a relative eyeblink of the usual evolutionary timescale. The new brain triggered the invention of writing, and the effects are now overloading that new brain, kind of like a four-year-old kid trying to control a Ferrari.

If people in power spent more time in these states, they would make better decisions causing less suffering than at present. If people not in power spent more time in these states, they would move into power and thus be able — if not seduced by the ego — to bring about positive change. Hence, the mission of the Institute is to spread experiential knowledge of these states, and the techniques for achieving and maintaining them.

The first moments of waking up in the morning are a perfect time to remember the Observer state. As the day begins, so shall it most likely go, until one’s will has become strong enough to overcome a bad start.

First, while remaining in the hypnagogic state by avoiding the use of language orally or mentally, and filtering out any distractions, stay focused on the feeling of whatever dreams you had, and recapture whatever images you can from those dreams. Stay with the feelings and images a moment longer until you can get a hunch as to the possible sense of those dreams — what is the message from your subconscious? Jot down notes as soon as you feel you have to actually open your eyes and get out of bed.

Even better if you can move on to your day while still in bed and still sleeping as far as anyone can tell. Get a fix on the possible significance of the day, what you can potentially accomplish. Visualize an upside outcome that will make you happy when you go to sleep next. This is your strong intention, your Will. Feel it. Then see what could go wrong and come up with ideas as to how to deal with those challenges. No one in Acceleritis has the luxury of much time to spend on such thinking, so you can settle for brief flashes of the direction of an idea to be worked out in detail later. Making notes while they are fresh in your mind will be a huge advantage.

The older parts of the brain such as the amygdala are involved in the ego process, which keeps you out of the two higher states of consciousness, Observer and Flow. This ego process is driven by fear of failure in one form or another, and derives from excessive attachment, which itself is the product of past events perceived as failures that have not been fully assimilated as wonderful learning experiences. The Observer lens helps one float upward out of this debris and gain perspective on it. Then one can enter the Zone, typically in an activity one has practiced for a long time.

As we wrote in the last post, the best strategy for getting into the Zone is to start by slipping into the far more easily achieved Observer state.

Doing anything to master oneself cognitively and/or emotionally involves mental trickery of the culturally-induced false self we call the ego. I prefer the term “robot” because this power center is built out of neuronal software, so the word “robot” helps to remind ourselves that we are dealing with a stubborn biocomputer system not unlike the overly helpful systems installed on most of our personal computers. We cooperated in setting up these well-intentioned programs, which today have taken over the castle so completely that we identify with these systems as if they are the true us.

There is actually a gap we estimate to be less than a tenth of a second in which a suggestion/command from the robot is not yet identified as being our own intention. When in the Zone state we can instantly detect it as an ego command that we can choose to ignore. A lot like playing Simon Says.

In the Observer state the modus operandi is to set oneself up to not act immediately on inner impulses. This way, one has time to realize a moment after the fact that the impulse seemed intelligent for a second but in retrospect — having not yet acted upon it — we see the impulse as just another clever ego-driven strategy masquerading as our own true self.

This is the Observer state — so named because one is observing oneself as well as everything else. Before accepting the mantle of an emotion that raised its hand as one’s own, or taking physical action, or accepting a point of view offered by a thought, one waits for good sense to settle in.

In the hurly-burly of Acceleritis, the ubiquitous condition of our culture, taking this contemplative mental/emotive state requires us to be motivated to exercise our true will and understand as a prime directive that we cannot achieve our goals in the real world unless we are centered within our own highest true self, not being manipulated by our fear-impelled robot. Motivation combined with understanding are the only foundation that will allow us to overcome the chemically-supported (hormones, adrenalin, cortisol, norepinephrine, etc.) domination of our moment-to-moment emotions. It is mighty tempting to accept anger and self-righteousness whenever these feelings arise in response to valid cases of unfairness and injustice, which no doubt abound. Yet taking on these emotions makes us virtually helpless to right the wrongs since our negativity only fans the flames. Remembering this is the way one stays in the Observer state.

It’s also helpful to remember that the true hero acts in freedom, nobly and objectively with compassion, and is not the puppet of the emotional mind control instituted by habituated stimulus-response trigger cascades.

In mastering one’s mechanical behaviors, one is always negotiating the landscape of a devilishly challenging inner videogame, using one’s own tricks learned from mistakes made along the way, peeling away layer after layer and rising higher and higher in the game.

This is our intuitive and scientific (i.e. subject to verifiability) decoding of the advice given by the ancient psychologies of the East and West, Raja and Jnana Yogas, Zen, Kabbalah, Early Christianity, Hermetism/Gnosticism/Alchemy, the true Great Jihad, known by innumerable other names in other cultures. All detected the same inner battle and described it metaphorically, having no information-processing framework in which to describe it transparently.

Now we have such a framework. Each individual reading this has access to his or her own mind and emotions and therefore can test and verify our statements. Doing so will not only benefit the individual but will tend to bring more of us into higher states of functional effectiveness, where we will all serve each other more effectively than before.

What is it about the beautiful state of Colorado that explains first Columbine and now Aurora? The cowboys and today’s anarchistic militias, fiercely independent, have been associated with the Western frontier that started over 400 years ago in New England and then rolled out across the Rockies to the Pacific shore. Maybe that has something to do with it. Deep sigh.

As always, the tragedy contains a deeply buried profound mystery. How is it that ordinary people turn out to be real heroes when the going gets tough? What are we all made of inside that causes so many of us to unhesitatingly step in front of the bullet to save others?

In my intuitive cosmogony (to be released as a book later this year, entitled Imagine) it is the fact that you and I, all of us, are not who we think we are — separate entities cut off from everything else in the universe, out for ourselves. We are like pseudopods of a giant amoeba of consciousness that is the Universe, itself conscious and divine. Living through each of us is the One Divine Original Consciousness, which is the only thing that exists. What we take to be our own island of consciousness is actually the Universe’s local consciousness cache, temporarily cut off from the consciousness of the whole, for the never-ending adventure of existence.

Why then does the Universe turn bad, becoming so negative in one such pseudopod as to want to destroy complete strangers?

It comes with the territory — where there is free will, there will be error. The Jewish esoteric philosophy of Kabbalah explains that sin, aka evil, is missing the mark. The “mark” is right action for the circumstances. The insight is that no one purposely misses the mark — they are self-deluded into missing the mark.

Acceleritis has been around for as long as the human race has recorded history. According to my theory, the written language (seeable symbolic abstraction) that permits recording history is itself the primal cause of Acceleritis. My colleague Dr. Phillip Romero sets the start of human abstraction 35,000 – 40,000 years earlier than written language, in the cave paintings — when art began — although he does not assert that Acceleritis began with art.

It is Acceleritis that causes error (sin, evil) to be so remarkably widespread, and makes so many people capable of killing wantonly. And yet such people are a miniscule fraction of the human race, and most of us are as heroic as the heroes that populate our movies, TV dramas, and novels.

In the decades and centuries to come, it is my dream that we will conquer Acceleritis by training our minds to deal with the attachment, false ego selves, and emotionally-charged information overload that causes even such a small fraction of us to go so bad as to generate widespread suffering.